Hawthorne, by Henry James

Chapter 4

Brook Farm and Concord.

The history of the little industrial and intellectual association which formed itself at this time
in one of the suburbs of Boston has not, to my knowledge, been written; though it is assuredly a curious and
interesting chapter in the domestic annals of New England. It would of course be easy to overrate the importance of
this ingenious attempt of a few speculative persons to improve the outlook of mankind. The experiment came and went
very rapidly and quietly, leaving very few traces behind it. It became simply a charming personal reminiscence for the
small number of amiable enthusiasts who had had a hand in it. There were degrees of enthusiasm, and I suppose there
were degrees of amiability; but a certain generous brightness of hope and freshness of conviction pervaded the whole
undertaking and rendered it, morally speaking, important to an extent of which any heed that the world in general ever
gave to it is an insufficient measure. Of course it would be a great mistake to represent the episode of Brook Farm as
directly related to the manners and morals of the New England world in general — and in especial to those of the
prosperous, opulent, comfortable part of it. The thing was the experiment of a coterie — it was unusual, unfashionable,
unsuccessful. It was, as would then have been said, an amusement of the Transcendentalists — a harmless effusion of
Radicalism. The Transcendentalists were not, after all, very numerous; and the Radicals were by no means of the vivid
tinge of those of our own day. I have said that the Brook Farm community left no traces behind it that the world in
general can appreciate; I should rather say that the only trace is a short novel, of which the principal merits reside
in its qualities of difference from the affair itself. The Blithedale Romance is the main result of Brook
Farm; but The Blithedale Romance was very properly never recognised by the Brook Farmers as an accurate
portrait of their little colony.

Nevertheless, in a society as to which the more frequent complaint is that it is monotonous, that it lacks variety
of incident and of type, the episode, our own business with which is simply that it was the cause of Hawthorne’s
writing an admirable tale, might be welcomed as a picturesque variation. At the same time, if we do not exaggerate its
proportions, it may seem to contain a fund of illustration as to that phase of human life with which our author’s own
history mingled itself. The most graceful account of the origin of Brook Farm is probably to be found in these words of
one of the biographers of Margaret Fuller: “In Boston and its vicinity, several friends, for whose character Margaret
felt the highest-honour, were earnestly considering the possibility of making such industrial, social, and educational
arrangements as would simplify economies, combine leisure for study with healthful and honest toil, avert unjust
collisions of caste, equalise refinements, awaken generous affections, diffuse courtesy, and sweeten and sanctify life
as a whole.” The reader will perceive that this was a liberal scheme, and that if the experiment failed, the greater
was the pity. The writer goes on to say that a gentleman, who afterwards distinguished himself in literature (he had
begun by being a clergyman), “convinced by his experience in a faithful ministry that the need was urgent for a
thorough application of the professed principles of Fraternity to actual relations, was about staking his all of
fortune, reputation, and influence, in an attempt to organize a joint-stock company at Brook Farm.” As Margaret Fuller
passes for having suggested to Hawthorne the figure of Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance, and as she is
probably, with one exception, the person connected with the affair who, after Hawthorne, offered most of what is called
a personality to the world, I may venture to quote a few more passages from her Memoirs — a curious, in some points of
view almost a grotesque, and yet, on the whole, as I have said, an extremely interesting book. It was a strange history
and a strange destiny, that of this brilliant, restless, and unhappy woman — this ardent New Englander, this
impassioned Yankee, who occupied so large a place in the thoughts, the lives, the affections, of an intelligent and
appreciative society, and yet left behind her nothing but the memory of a memory. Her function, her reputation, were
singular, and not altogether reassuring: she was a talker, she was the talker, she was the genius of talk. She
had a magnificent, though by no means an unmitigated, egotism; and in some of her utterances it is difficult to say
whether pride or humility prevails — as for instance when she writes that she feels “that there is plenty of room in
the Universe for my faults, and as if I could not spend time in thinking of them when so many things interest me more.”
She has left the same sort of reputation as a great actress. Some of her writing has extreme beauty, almost all of it
has a real interest, but her value, her activity, her sway (I am not sure that one can say her charm), were personal
and practical. She went to Europe, expanded to new desires and interests, and, very poor herself, married an
impoverished Italian nobleman. Then, with her husband and child, she embarked to return to her own country, and was
lost at sea in a terrible storm, within sight of its coasts. Her tragical death combined with many of the elements of
her life to convert her memory into a sort of legend, so that the people who had known her well, grew at last to be
envied by later comers. Hawthorne does not appear to have been intimate with her; on the contrary, I find such an entry
as this in the American Note–Books in 1841: “I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft’s yesterday, with Miss Margaret
Fuller; but Providence had given me some business to do; for which I was very thankful!” It is true that, later, the
lady is the subject of one or two allusions of a gentler cast. One of them indeed is so pretty as to be worth
quoting:—

“After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson’s, I returned through the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a
lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole
afternoon, meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with some strange title which I did not understand and
have forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no
inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of
them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining
on the ground and me standing by her side. He made some remark upon the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself
into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about
the crows, whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon
the character after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the
view from their summits; and about other matters of high and low philosophy.”

It is safe to assume that Hawthorne could not on the whole have had a high relish for the very positive personality
of this accomplished and argumentative woman, in whose intellect high noon seemed ever to reign, as twilight did in his
own. He must have been struck with the glare of her understanding, and, mentally speaking, have scowled and blinked a
good deal in conversation with her. But it is tolerably manifest, nevertheless, that she was, in his imagination, the
starting-point of the figure of Zenobia; and Zenobia is, to my sense, his only very definite attempt at the
representation of a character. The portrait is full of alteration and embellishment; but it has a greater reality, a
greater abundance of detail, than any of his other figures, and the reality was a memory of the lady whom he had
encountered in the Roxbury pastoral or among the wood-walks of Concord, with strange books in her hand and eloquent
discourse on her lips. The Blithedale Romance was written just after her unhappy death, when the reverberation
of her talk would lose much of its harshness. In fact, however, very much the same qualities that made Hawthorne a
Democrat in polities — his contemplative turn and absence of a keen perception of abuses, his taste for old ideals, and
loitering paces, and muffled tones — would operate to keep him out of active sympathy with a woman of the so-called
progressive type. We may be sure that in women his taste was conservative.

It seems odd, as his biographer says, “that the least gregarious of men should have been drawn into a socialistic
community;” but although it is apparent that Hawthorne went to Brook Farm without any great Transcendental fervour, yet
he had various good reasons for casting his lot in this would-be happy family. He was as yet unable to marry, but he
naturally wished to do so as speedily as possible, and there was a prospect that Brook Farm would prove an economical
residence. And then it is only fair to believe that Hawthorne was interested in the experiment, and that though he was
not a Transcendentalist, an Abolitionist, or a Fourierite, as his companions were in some degree or other likely to be,
he was willing, as a generous and unoccupied young man, to lend a hand in any reasonable scheme for helping people to
live together on better terms than the common. The Brook Farm scheme was, as such things go, a reasonable one; it was
devised and carried out by shrewd and sober-minded New Englanders, who were careful to place economy first and idealism
afterwards, and who were not afflicted with a Gallic passion for completeness of theory. There were no formulas,
doctrines, dogmas; there was no interference whatever with private life or individual habits, and not the faintest
adumbration of a rearrangement of that difficult business known as the relations of the sexes. The relations of the
sexes were neither more nor less than what they usually are in American life, excellent; and in such particulars the
scheme was thoroughly conservative and irreproachable. Its main characteristic was that each individual concerned in it
should do a part of the work necessary for keeping the whole machine going. He could choose his work and he could live
as he liked; it was hoped, but it was by no means demanded, that he would make himself agreeable, like a gentleman
invited to a dinner-party. Allowing, however, for everything that was a concession to worldly traditions and to the
laxity of man’s nature, there must have been in the enterprise a good deal of a certain freshness and purity of spirit,
of a certain noble credulity and faith in the perfectibility of man, which it would have been easier to find in Boston
in the year 1840, than in London five-and-thirty years later. If that was the era of Transcendentalism,
Transcendentalism could only have sprouted in the soil peculiar to the general locality of which I speak — the soil of
the old New England morality, gently raked and refreshed by an imported culture. The Transcendentalists read a great
deal of French and German, made themselves intimate with George Sand and Goethe, and many other writers; but the strong
and deep New England conscience accompanied them on all their intellectual excursions, and there never was a so-called
“movement” that embodied itself, on the whole, in fewer eccentricities of conduct, or that borrowed a smaller licence
in private deportment. Henry Thoreau, a delightful writer, went to live in the woods; but Henry Thoreau was essentially
a sylvan personage and would not have been, however the fashion of his time might have turned, a man about town. The
brothers and sisters at Brook Farm ploughed the fields and milked the cows; but I think that an observer from another
clime and society would have been much more struck with their spirit of conformity than with their
déréglements. Their ardour was a moral ardour, and the lightest breath of scandal never rested upon them, or
upon any phase of Transcendentalism.

A biographer of Hawthorne might well regret that his hero had not been more mixed up with the reforming and
free-thinking class, so that he might find a pretext for writing a chapter upon the state of Boston society forty years
ago. A needful warrant for such regret should be, properly, that the biographer’s own personal reminiscences should
stretch back to that period and to the persons who animated it. This would be a guarantee of fulness of knowledge and,
presumably, of kindness of tone. It is difficult to see, indeed, how the generation of which Hawthorne has given us, in
Blithedale, a few portraits, should not at this time of day be spoken of very tenderly and sympathetically. If
irony enter into the allusion, it should be of the lightest and gentlest. Certainly, for a brief and imperfect
chronicler of these things, a writer just touching them as he passes, and who has not the advantage of having been a
contemporary, there is only one possible tone. The compiler of these pages, though his recollections date only from a
later period, has a memory of a certain number of persons who had been intimately connected, as Hawthorne was not, with
the agitations of that interesting time. Something of its interest adhered to them still — something of its aroma clung
to their garments; there was something about them which seemed to say that when they were young and enthusiastic, they
had been initiated into moral mysteries, they had played at a wonderful game. Their usual mark (it is true I can think
of exceptions) was that they seemed excellently good. They appeared unstained by the world, unfamiliar with worldly
desires and standards, and with those various forms of human depravity which flourish in some high phases of
civilisation; inclined to simple and democratic ways, destitute of pretensions and affectations, of jealousies, of
cynicism, of snobbishness. This little epoch of fermentation has three or four drawbacks for the critic — drawbacks,
however, that may be overlooked by a person for whom it has an interest of association. It bore, intellectually, the
stamp of provincialism; it was a beginning without a fruition, a dawn without a noon; and it produced, with a single
exception, no great talents. It produced a great deal of writing, but (always putting Hawthorne aside, as a
contemporary but not a sharer) only one writer in whom the world at large has interested itself. The situation was
summed up and transfigured in the admirable and exquisite Emerson. He expressed all that it contained, and a good deal
more, doubtless, besides; he was the man of genius of the moment; he was the Transcendentalist par excellence.
Emerson expressed, before all things, as was extremely natural at the hour and in the place, the value and importance
of the individual, the duty of making the most of one’s self, of living by one’s own personal light and carrying out
one’s own disposition. He reflected with beautiful irony upon the exquisite impudence of those institutions which claim
to have appropriated the truth and to dole it out, in proportionate morsels, in exchange for a subscription. He talked
about the beauty and dignity of life, and about every one who is born into the world being born to the whole, having an
interest and a stake in the whole. He said “all that is clearly due today is not to lie,” and a great many other things
which it would be still easier to present in a ridiculous light. He insisted upon sincerity and independence and
spontaneity, upon acting in harmony with one’s nature, and not conforming and compromising for the sake of being more
comfortable. He urged that a man should await his call, his finding the thing to do which he should really believe in
doing, and not be urged by the world’s opinion to do simply the world’s work. “If no call should come for years, for
centuries, then I know that the want of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence. . . . If I
cannot work, at least I need not lie.” The doctrine of the supremacy of the individual to himself, of his originality
and, as regards his own character, unique quality, must have had a great charm for people living in a society
in which introspection, thanks to the want of other entertainment, played almost the part of a social resource.

In the United States, in those days, there were no great things to look out at (save forests and rivers); life was
not in the least spectacular; society was not brilliant; the country was given up to a great material prosperity, a
homely bourgeois activity, a diffusion of primary education and the common luxuries. There was therefore,
among the cultivated classes, much relish for the utterances of a writer who would help one to take a picturesque view
of one’s internal possibilities, and to find in the landscape of the soul all sorts of fine sunrise and moonlight
effects. “Meantime, while the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this
truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely — it is an intuition. It cannot be received at
second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul.” To make one’s
self so much more interesting would help to make life interesting, and life was probably, to many of this aspiring
congregation, a dream of freedom and fortitude. There were faulty parts in the Emersonian philosophy; but the general
tone was magnificent; and I can easily believe that, coming when it did and where it did, it should have been drunk in
by a great many fine moral appetites with a sense of intoxication. One envies, even, I will not say the illusions, of
that keenly sentient period, but the convictions and interests — the moral passion. One certainly envies the privilege
of having heard the finest of Emerson’s orations poured forth in their early newness. They were the most poetical, the
most beautiful productions of the American mind, and they were thoroughly local and national. They had a music and a
magic, and when one remembers the remarkable charm of the speaker, the beautiful modulation of his utterance, one
regrets in especial that one might not have been present on a certain occasion which made a sensation, an era — the
delivery of an address to the Divinity School of Harvard University, on a summer evening in 1838. In the light, fresh
American air, unthickened and undarkened by customs and institutions established, these things, as the phrase is,
told.

Hawthorne appears, like his own Miles Coverdale, to have arrived at Brook Farm in the midst of one of those April
snow-storms which, during the New England spring, occasionally diversify the inaction of the vernal process. Miles
Coverdale, in The Blithedale Romance, is evidently as much Hawthorne as he is any one else in particular. He
is indeed not very markedly any one, unless it be the spectator, the observer; his chief identity lies in his success
in looking at things objectively and spinning uncommunicated fancies about them. This indeed was the part that
Hawthorne played socially in the little community at West Roxbury. His biographer describes him as sitting “silently,
hour after hour, in the broad old-fashioned hall of the house, where he could listen almost unseen to the chat and
merriment of the young people, himself almost always holding a book before him, but seldom turning the leaves.” He put
his hand to the plough and supported himself and the community, as they were all supposed to do, by his labour; but he
contributed little to the hum of voices. Some of his companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a
gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of coming to the place as a sort of intellectual
vampire, for purely psychological purposes. He sat in a corner, they declared, and watched the inmates when they were
off their guard, analysing their characters, and dissecting the amiable ardour, the magnanimous illusions, which he was
too cold-blooded to share. In so far as this account of Hawthorne’s attitude was a complaint, it was a singularly
childish one. If he was at Brook Farm without being of it, this is a very fortunate circumstance from the point of view
of posterity, who would have preserved but a slender memory of the affair if our author’s fine novel had not kept the
topic open. The complaint is indeed almost so ungrateful a one as to make us regret that the author’s fellow-communists
came off so easily. They certainly would not have done so if the author of Blithedale had been more of a
satirist. Certainly, if Hawthorne was an observer, he was a very harmless one; and when one thinks of the queer
specimens of the reforming genus with which he must have been surrounded, one almost wishes that, for our
entertainment, he had given his old companions something to complain of in earnest. There is no satire whatever in the
Romance; the quality is almost conspicuous by its absence. Of portraits there are only two; there is no
sketching of odd figures — no reproduction of strange types of radicalism; the human background is left vague.
Hawthorne was not a satirist, and if at Brook Farm he was, according to his habit, a good deal of a mild sceptic, his
scepticism was exercised much more in the interest of fancy than in that of reality.

There must have been something pleasantly bucolic and pastoral in the habits of the place during the fine New
England summer; but we have no retrospective envy of the denizens of Brook Farm in that other season which, as
Hawthorne somewhere says, leaves in those regions, “so large a blank — so melancholy a deathspot — in lives so brief
that they ought to be all summer-time.” “Of a summer night, when the moon was full,” says Mr. Lathrop, “they lit no
lamps, but sat grouped in the light and shadow, while sundry of the younger men sang old ballads, or joined Tom Moore’s
songs to operatic airs. On other nights there would be an original essay or poem read aloud, or else a play of
Shakspeare, with the parts distributed to different members; and these amusements failing, some interesting discussion
was likely to take their place. Occasionally, in the dramatic season, large delegations from the farm would drive into
Boston, in carriages and waggons, to the opera or the play. Sometimes, too, the young women sang as they washed the
dishes in the Hive; and the youthful yeomen of the society came in and helped them with their work. The men wore
blouses of a checked or plaided stuff, belted at the waist, with a broad collar folding down about the throat, and
rough straw hats; the women, usually, simple calico gowns and hats.” All this sounds delightfully Arcadian and
innocent, and it is certain that there was something peculiar to the clime and race in some of the features of such a
life; in the free, frank, and stainless companionship of young men and maidens, in the mixture of manual labour and
intellectual flights — dish-washing and æsthetics, wood-chopping and philosophy. Wordsworth’s “plain living and high
thinking” were made actual. Some passages in Margaret Fuller’s journals throw plenty of light on this. (It must be
premised that she was at Brook Farm as an occasional visitor; not as a labourer in the Hive.)

“All Saturday I was off in the woods. In the evening we had a general conversation, opened by me, upon Education, in
its largest sense, and on what we can do for ourselves and others. I took my usual ground:— The aim is perfection;
patience the road. Our lives should be considered as a tendency, an approximation only. . . . Mr. R. spoke
admirably on the nature of loyalty. The people showed a good deal of the sans-culotte tendency in their
manners, throwing themselves on the floor, yawning, and going out when they had heard enough. Yet as the majority
differ with me, to begin with — that being the reason this subject was chosen — they showed on the whole more interest
and deference than I had expected. As I am accustomed to deference, however, and need it for the boldness and animation
which my part requires, I did not speak with as much force as usual. . . . Sunday. — A glorious day; the
woods full of perfume; I was out all the morning. In the afternoon Mrs. R. and I had a talk. I said my position would
be too uncertain here, as I could not work. —— said ‘they would all like to work for a person of genius.’
. . . ‘Yes,’ I told her; ‘but where would be my repose when they were always to be judging whether I was
worth it or not?. . . . Each day you must prove yourself anew.’ . . . We talked of the principles
of the community. I said I had not a right to come, because all the confidence I had in it was as an
experiment worth trying, and that it was part of the great wave of inspired thought. . . . We had
valuable discussion on these points. All Monday morning in the woods again. Afternoon, out with the drawing party; I
felt the evils of the want of conventional refinement, in the impudence with which one of the girls treated me. She has
since thought of it with regret, I notice; and by every day’s observation of me will see that she ought not to have
done it. In the evening a husking in the barn . . . a most picturesque scene. . . . I stayed and
helped about half an hour, and then took a long walk beneath the stars. Wednesday. . . . In the evening a
conversation on Impulse. . . . I defended nature, as I always do; — the spirit ascending through, not
superseding, nature. But in the scale of Sense, Intellect, Spirit, I advocated the claims of Intellect, because those
present were rather disposed to postpone them. On the nature of Beauty we had good talk. —— seemed in a much more
reverent humour than the other night, and enjoyed the large plans of the universe which were unrolled. . . .
Saturday — Well, good-bye, Brook Farm. I know more about this place than I did when I came; but the only way to be
qualified for a judge of such an experiment would be to become an active, though unimpassioned, associate in trying it.
. . . The girl who was so rude to me stood waiting, with a timid air, to bid me good-bye.”

The young girl in question cannot have been Hawthorne’s charming Priscilla; nor yet another young lady, of a most
humble spirit, who communicated to Margaret’s biographers her recollections of this remarkable woman’s visits to Brook
Farm; concluding with the assurance that “after a while she seemed to lose sight of my more prominent and disagreeable
peculiarities, and treated me with affectionate regard.”

Hawthorne’s farewell to the place appears to have been accompanied with some reflections of a cast similar to those
indicated by Miss Fuller; in so far at least as we may attribute to Hawthorne himself some of the observations that he
fathers upon Miles Coverdale. His biographer justly quotes two or three sentences from The Blithedale Romance,
as striking the note of the author’s feeling about the place. “No sagacious man,” says Coverdale, “will long retain his
sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning to the settled
system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint.” And he remarks elsewhere that “it
struck me as rather odd that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling,
self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own
field of labour. But to tell the truth, I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a
position of new hostility rather than new brotherhood.” He was doubtless oppressed by the “sultry heat of society,” as
he calls it in one of the jottings in the Note–Books. “What would a man do if he were compelled to live always in the
sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?” His biographer relates that one of the other
Brook Farmers, wandering afield one summer’s day, discovered Hawthorne stretched at his length upon a grassy hillside,
with his hat pulled over his face, and every appearance, in his attitude, of the desire to escape detection. On his
asking him whether he had any particular reason for this shyness of posture —“Too much of a party up there!” Hawthorne
contented himself with replying, with a nod in the direction of the Hive. He had nevertheless for a time looked forward
to remaining indefinitely in the community; he meant to marry as soon as possible and bring his wife there to live.
Some sixty pages of the second volume of the American Note–Books are occupied with extracts from his letters to his
future wife and from his journal (which appears however at this time to have been only intermittent), consisting almost
exclusively of descriptions of the simple scenery of the neighbourhood, and of the state of the woods and fields and
weather. Hawthorne’s fondness for all the common things of nature was deep and constant, and there is always something
charming in his verbal touch, as we may call it, when he talks to himself about them. “Oh,” he breaks out, of an
October afternoon, “the beauty of grassy slopes, and the hollow ways of paths winding between hills, and the intervals
between the road and wood-lots, where Summer lingers and sits down, strewing dandelions of gold and blue asters as her
parting gifts and memorials!” He was but a single summer at Brook Farm; the rest of his residence had the
winter-quality.

But if he returned to solitude, it was henceforth to be as the French say, a solitude à deux. He was
married in July 1842, and betook himself immediately to the ancient village of Concord, near Boston, where he occupied
the so-called Manse which has given the title to one of his collections of tales, and upon which this work, in turn,
has conferred a permanent distinction. I use the epithets “ancient” and “near” in the foregoing sentence, according to
the American measurement of time and distance. Concord is some twenty miles from Boston, and even to day, upwards of
forty years after the date of Hawthorne’s removal thither, it is a very fresh and well-preserved looking town. It had
already a local history when, a hundred years ago, the larger current of human affairs flowed for a moment around it.
Concord has the honour of being the first spot in which blood was shed in the war of the Revolution; here occurred the
first exchange of musket-shots between the King’s troops and the American insurgents. Here, as Emerson says in the
little hymn which he contributed in 1836 to the dedication of a small monument commemorating this
circumstance —

“Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.”

The battle was a small one, and the farmers were not destined individually to emerge from obscurity; but the memory
of these things has kept the reputation of Concord green, and it has been watered, moreover, so to speak, by the
life-long presence there of one of the most honoured of American men of letters — the poet from whom I just quoted two
lines. Concord is indeed in itself decidedly verdant, and is an excellent specimen of a New England village of the
riper sort. At the time of Hawthorne’s first going there it must have been an even better specimen than today — more
homogeneous, more indigenous, more absolutely democratic. Forty years ago the tide of foreign immigration had scarcely
begun to break upon the rural strongholds of the New England race; it had at most begun to splash them with the salt
Hibernian spray. It is very possible, however, that at this period there was not an Irishman in Concord; the place
would have been a village community operating in excellent conditions. Such a village community was not the least
honourable item in the sum of New England civilisation. Its spreading elms and plain white houses, its generous summers
and ponderous winters, its immediate background of promiscuous field and forest, would have been part of the
composition. For the rest, there were the selectmen and the town-meetings, the town-schools and the self-governing
spirit, the rigid morality, the friendly and familiar manners, the perfect competence of the little society to manage
its affairs itself. In the delightful introduction to the Mosses, Hawthorne has given an account of his
dwelling, of his simple occupations and recreations, and of some of the characteristics of the place. The Manse is a
large, square wooden house, to the surface of which — even in the dry New England air, so unfriendly to mosses and
lichens and weather-stains, and the other elements of a picturesque complexion — a hundred and fifty years of exposure
have imparted a kind of tone, standing just above the slow-flowing Concord river, and approached by a short avenue of
over-arching trees. It had been the dwelling-place of generations of Presbyterian ministers, ancestors of the
celebrated Emerson, who had himself spent his early manhood and written some of his most beautiful essays there. “He
used,” as Hawthorne says, “to watch the Assyrian dawn, and Paphian sunset and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern
hill.” From its clerical occupants the place had inherited a mild mustiness of theological association — a vague
reverberation of old Calvinistic sermons, which served to deepen its extra-mundane and somnolent quality. The three
years that Hawthorne passed here were, I should suppose, among the happiest of his life. The future was indeed not in
any special manner assured; but the present was sufficiently genial. In the American Note–Books there is a charming
passage (too long to quote) descriptive of the entertainment the new couple found in renovating and re-furnishing the
old parsonage, which, at the time of their going into it, was given up to ghosts and cobwebs. Of the little
drawing-room, which had been most completely reclaimed, he writes that “the shade of our departed host will never haunt
it; for its aspect has been as completely changed as the scenery of a theatre. Probably the ghost gave one peep into
it, uttered a groan, and vanished for ever.” This departed host was a certain Doctor Ripley, a venerable scholar, who
left behind him a reputation of learning and sanctity which was reproduced in one of the ladies of his family, long the
most distinguished woman in the little Concord circle. Doctor Ripley’s predecessor had been, I believe, the last of the
line of the Emerson ministers — an old gentleman who, in the earlier years of his pastorate, stood at the window of his
study (the same in which Hawthorne handled a more irresponsible quill) watching, with his hands under his long
coat-tails, the progress of Concord fight. It is not by any means related, however, I should add, that he waited for
the conclusion to make up his mind which was the righteous cause.

Hawthorne had a little society (as much, we may infer, as he desired), and it was excellent in quality. But the
pages in the Note–Books which relate to his life at the Manse, and the introduction to the Mosses, make more
of his relations with vegetable nature, and of his customary contemplation of the incidents of wood-path and way-side,
than of the human elements of the scene; though these also are gracefully touched upon. These pages treat largely of
the pleasures of a kitchen-garden, of the beauty of summer-squashes, and of the mysteries of apple-raising. With the
wholesome aroma of apples (as is indeed almost necessarily the case in any realistic record of New England rural life)
they are especially pervaded; and with many other homely and domestic emanations; all of which derive a sweetness from
the medium of our author’s colloquial style. Hawthorne was silent with his lips; but he talked with his pen. The tone
of his writing is often that of charming talk — ingenious, fanciful, slow-flowing, with all the lightness of gossip,
and none of its vulgarity. In the preface to the tales written at the Manse he talks of many things and just touches
upon some of the members of his circle — especially upon that odd genius, his fellow-villager, Henry Thoreau. I said a
little way back that the New England Transcendental movement had suffered in the estimation of the world at large from
not having (putting Emerson aside) produced any superior talents. But any reference to it would be ungenerous which
should omit to pay a tribute in passing to the author of Walden. Whatever question there may be of his talent,
there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was
imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial — he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is
readable. But at his best he has an extreme natural charm, and he must always be mentioned after those Americans —
Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley — who have written originally. He was Emerson’s independent moral man
made flesh — living for the ages, and not for Saturday and Sunday; for the Universe, and not for Concord. In fact,
however, Thoreau lived for Concord very effectually, and by his remarkable genius for the observation of the phenomena
of woods and streams, of plants and trees, and beasts and fishes, and for flinging a kind of spiritual interest over
these things, he did more than he perhaps intended toward consolidating the fame of his accidental human sojourn. He
was as shy and ungregarious as Hawthorne; but he and the latter appear to have been sociably disposed towards each
other, and there are some charming touches in the preface to the Mosses in regard to the hours they spent in
boating together on the large, quiet Concord river. Thoreau was a great voyager, in a canoe which he had constructed
himself, and which he eventually made over to Hawthorne, and as expert in the use of the paddle as the Red men who had
once haunted the same silent stream. The most frequent of Hawthorne’s companions on these excursions appears, however,
to have been a local celebrity — as well as Thoreau a high Transcendentalist — Mr. Ellery Channing, whom I may mention,
since he is mentioned very explicitly in the preface to the Mosses, and also because no account of the little
Concord world would be complete which should omit him. He was the son of the distinguished Unitarian moralist, and, I
believe, the intimate friend of Thoreau, whom he resembled in having produced literary compositions more esteemed by
the few than by the many. He and Hawthorne were both fishermen, and the two used to set themselves afloat in the summer
afternoons. “Strange and happy times were those,” exclaims the more distinguished of the two writers, “when we cast
aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes, and delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the
Indians or any less conventional race, during one bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing our boat against the current,
between wide meadows, we turned aside into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a mile above its junction
with the Concord, has never flowed on earth — nowhere indeed except to lave the interior regions of a poet’s
imagination. . . . It comes flowing softly through the midmost privacy and deepest heart of a wood which
whispers it to be quiet; while the stream whispers back again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were hushing
one another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of the sky and the clustering foliage.
. . . ” While Hawthorne was looking at these beautiful things, or, for that matter, was writing them, he was
well out of the way of a certain class of visitants whom he alludes to in one of the closing passages of this long
Introduction. “Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely-dressed,
oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simply
bores of a very intense character.” “These hobgoblins of flesh and blood,” he says in a preceding paragraph, “were
attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker who had his earthly abode at the opposite
extremity of our village. . . . People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought they fancied new, came
to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary, to ascertain its quality and value.” And Hawthorne
enumerates some of the categories of pilgrims to the shrine of the mystic counsellor, who as a general thing was
probably far from abounding in their own sense (when this sense was perverted), but gave them a due measure of plain
practical advice. The whole passage is interesting, and it suggests that little Concord had not been ill-treated by the
fates — with “a great original thinker” at one end of the village, an exquisite teller of tales at the other, and the
rows of New England elms between. It contains moreover an admirable sentence about Hawthorne’s pilgrim-haunted
neighbour, with whom, “being happy,” as he says, and feeling therefore “as if there were no question to be put,” he was
not in metaphysical communion. “It was good nevertheless to meet him in the wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue,
with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of a shining one; and he so quiet, so
simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart!” One
may without indiscretion risk the surmise that Hawthorne’s perception, of the “shining” element in his distinguished
friend was more intense than his friend’s appreciation of whatever luminous property might reside within the somewhat
dusky envelope of our hero’s identity as a collector of “mosses.” Emerson, as a sort of spiritual sun-worshipper, could
have attached but a moderate value to Hawthorne’s cat-like faculty of seeing in the dark.

“As to the daily coarse of our life,” the latter writes in the spring of 1843, “I have written with pretty
commendable diligence, averaging from two to four hours a day; and the result is seen in various magazines. I might
have written more if it had seemed worth while, but I was content to earn only so much gold as might suffice for our
immediate wants, having prospect of official station and emolument which would do away with the necessity of writing
for bread. These prospects have not yet had their fulfilment; and we are well content to wait, for an office would
inevitably remove us from our present happy home — at least from an outward home; for there is an inner one that will
accompany us wherever we go. Meantime, the magazine people do not pay their debts; so that we taste some of the
inconveniences of poverty. It is an annoyance, not a trouble.” And he goes on to give some account of his usual habits.
(The passage is from his Journal, and the account is given to himself, as it were, with that odd, unfamiliar
explicitness which marks the tone of this record throughout.) “Every day I trudge through snow and slosh to the
village, look into the post-office, and spend an hour at the reading-room; and then return home, generally without
having spoken a word to any human being. . . . In the way of exercise I saw and split wood, and physically I
was never in a better condition than now.” He adds a mention of an absence he had lately made. “I went alone to Salem,
where I resumed all my bachelor habits for nearly a fortnight, leading the same life in which ten years of my youth
flitted away like a dream. But how much changed was I! At last I had got hold of a reality which never could be taken
from me. It was good thus to get apart from my happiness for the sake of contemplating it.”

These compositions, which were so unpunctually paid for, appeared in the Democratic Review, a periodical
published at Washington, and having, as our author’s biographer says, “considerable pretensions to a national
character.” It is to be regretted that the practice of keeping its creditors waiting should, on the part of the
magazine in question, have been thought compatible with these pretensions. The foregoing lines are a description of a
very monotonous but a very contented life, and Mr. Lathrop justly remarks upon the dissonance of tone of the tales
Hawthorne produced under these happy circumstances. It is indeed not a little of an anomaly. The episode of the Manse
was one of the most agreeable he had known, and yet the best of the Mosses (though not the greater number of
them) are singularly dismal compositions. They are redolent of M. Montégut’s pessimism. “The reality of sin, the
pervasiveness of evil,” says Mr. Lathrop, “had been but slightly insisted upon in the earlier tales: in this series the
idea bursts up like a long-buried fire, with earth-shaking strength, and the pits of hell seem yawning beneath us.”
This is very true (allowing for Mr. Lathrop’s rather too emphatic way of putting it); but the anomaly is, I think, on
the whole, only superficial. Our writer’s imagination, as has been abundantly conceded, was a gloomy one; the old
Puritan sense of sin, of penalties to be paid, of the darkness and wickedness of life, had, as I have already
suggested, passed into it. It had not passed into the parts of Hawthorne’s nature corresponding to those occupied by
the same horrible vision of things in his ancestors; but it had still been determined to claim this later comer as its
own, and since his heart and his happiness were to escape, it insisted on setting its mark upon his genius — upon his
most beautiful organ, his admirable fancy. It may be said that when his fancy was strongest and keenest, when it was
most itself, then the dark Puritan tinge showed in it most richly; and there cannot be a better proof that he was not
the man of a sombre parti-pris whom M. Montégut describes, than the fact that these duskiest flowers of his
invention sprang straight from the soil of his happiest days. This surely indicates that there was but little direct
connection between the products of his fancy and the state of his affections. When he was lightest at heart, he was
most creative, and when he was most creative, the moral picturesqueness of the old secret of mankind in general and of
the Puritans in particular, most appealed to him — the secret that we are really not by any means so good as a
well-regulated society requires us to appear. It is not too much to say, even, that the very condition of production of
some of these unamiable tales would be that they should be superficial, and, as it were, insincere. The magnificent
little romance of Young Goodman Brown, for instance, evidently means nothing as regards Hawthorne’s own state
of mind, his conviction of human depravity and his consequent melancholy; for the simple reason that if it meant
anything, it would mean too much. Mr. Lathrop speaks of it as a “terrible and lurid parable;” but this, it seems to me,
is just what it is not. It is not a parable, but a picture, which is a very different thing. What does M. Montégut
make, one would ask, from the point of view of Hawthorne’s pessimism, of the singularly objective and unpreoccupied
tone of the Introduction to the Old Manse, in which the author speaks from himself, and in which the cry of
metaphysical despair is not even faintly sounded?

We have seen that when he went into the village he often came home without having spoken a word to a human being.
There is a touching entry made a little later, bearing upon his mild taciturnity. “A cloudy veil stretches across the
abyss of my nature. I have, however, no love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees through my
heart, and if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he is welcome to know everything that is there. Yes, and so may
any mortal who is capable of full sympathy, and therefore worthy to come into my depths. But he must find his own way
there; I can neither guide nor enlighten him.” It must be acknowledged, however, that if he was not able to open the
gate of conversation, it was sometimes because he was disposed to slide the bolt himself. “I had a purpose,” he writes,
shortly before the entry last quoted, “if circumstances would permit, of passing the whole term of my wife’s absence
without speaking a word to any human being.” He beguiled these incommunicative periods by studying German, in Tieck and
Bürger, without apparently making much progress; also in reading French, in Voltaire and Rabelais. “Just now,” he
writes, one October noon, “I heard a sharp tapping at the window of my study, and, looking up from my book (a volume of
Rabelais), behold, the head of a little bird, who seemed to demand admittance.” It was a quiet life, of course, in
which these diminutive incidents seemed noteworthy; and what is noteworthy here to the observer of Hawthorne’s
contemplative simplicity, is the fact that though he finds a good deal to say about the little bird (he devotes several
lines more to it) he makes no remark upon Rabelais. He had other visitors than little birds, however, and their demands
were also not Rabelaisian. Thoreau comes to see him, and they talk “upon the spiritual advantages of change of place,
and upon the Dial, and upon Mr. Alcott, and other kindred or concatenated subjects.” Mr. Alcott was an
arch-transcendentalist, living in Concord, and the Dial was a periodical to which the illuminated spirits of
Boston and its neighbourhood used to contribute. Another visitor comes and talks “of Margaret Fuller, who, he says, has
risen perceptibly into a higher state since their last meeting.” There is probably a great deal of Concord
five-and-thirty years ago in that little sentence!